Certain modern computer systems intended for consumer use have been designed to accommodate game applications by, for example, being configured with high-performance graphics processing units and substantial memory resources. However, game players desiring optimal game performance tend to want to minimize interferences in game performance caused by the execution of other programs. Simply put, users engaged in playing a game would prefer an uninterrupted experience and as much game performance as possible. However, game performance may often noticeably decrease when another program, such as, for example, an antivirus or a system update utility, begins to heavily utilize system resources.
Some, but not all optimizations can be achieved by manually configuring the operating system's settings. For example, some sophisticated users may engage in manually dedicating processor cores to the game process. This requires manually changing the affinity (i.e. on which processor cores the process is allowed to run) of every running process, except for key operating system processes which should not have their affinity changed. This procedure should be repeated each time a game is started. Obviously, this can be a time-consuming operation and it requires knowledge of internal characteristics of computer operating systems which most users will not possess.
Another approach has been to install a dedicated computer program to dedicate one or more cores of a multicore processor to a game process. However, such dedicated programs do not automatically detect when game applications are launched and tend to require users to start game applications through the application interface of the dedicated program. Moreover, such dedicated programs do not monitor the resource utilization of the game applications. As a result, a user may be required or incented to test or otherwise experiment with various features in order to determine their impact on performance.
Various antivirus vendors have “gaming modes” available in their products. Such gaming modes may be manually triggered or, alternatively, actuated when full screen operation is detected. Once a gaming mode has been triggered, antivirus protection may be turned off. This unfortunately leaves the computer system vulnerable to attack during the duration of game play and until the gaming mode is manually or automatically turned off. Moreover, existing antivirus gaming modes fail to dedicate processor cores to the game's process.
Other background processing programs including backup programs, file sync programs, cloud file sync programs (e.g., Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.), e-mail sync programs, may have the need for similar game modes . . . .